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Monday, November 12, 2018

My theme for this week is colorful dishes, when the world is brings you pink, red, yellow and all possible colors, here i m giving you jet black! Dont you love black! I love black, a color that suits all. A color that is hard to achieve in food, not impossible, but little hard. But here i got this black pretty easily, the spice mixture when ground is dark green but when you add jaggery to it, it turns a wonderful black.

Valli might think "what the heck" i told her to make colorful dishes and here she brings diwali legiyam??? Sorry valli, adjust it please!😉

Diwali marundhu/legiyam is a traditional medicine made during diwali and also exchanged with the sweets we share with our friends. This medicine is what we eat the first thing on diwali day, It helps you in digesting all the sweets and savories you are about to gorge on that day. Usually eating deep fried food causes lot of acidity and indigestion problems amongst many. During festivities, we do tend to over indulge and then run behind aerated drinks and keep burping the whole evening. But traditonal medicines like this help you naturally and make you feel better.

That doesn't mean you can eat a spoon of this everyday mornign and go about eating everything you see, moderation is the key on anyday. But when you indulge that one day, just one day, go for this marundhu first before you reach that aerated drink bottle.

Take all the ingredients from 1 to 4, measure correctly and in a large pan, dry roast them. Take care not to burn, just dry roast to get a nice aroma of the spices. Remove from the pan and using a mortar-pestle, roughly pound them. These are big roots, if grinding them at home, they might not budge for the mixer-grinder at home. So roughly pound them and try breaking them into small pieces. Soak them in water for 6-8 hours or even overnight. The water should be immersing the spices well. It is better to soak these separately, as it is easy to grind these bigger roots separately.

Now dry roast the ingredients from 5-11 in the same pan until you get a nice aroma of all the spices. Now soak these again in water for 6-8 hours or even overnight.

Pit the dried dates and soak it along with raisins for the same time 6-8 hours or overnight.

Once you have soaked for the required time, now we have to grind them all.

First let us grind the smaller spices (5-11). Take them along with soaked water and grind to a fine paste. Remove the ground paste to a separate bowl.

Next comes the monstrous looking roots. I ground them in batches. So grind in small batches to get a paste.Even then you might find lot of fiber in the paste, simply squeeze the juice out of them and discard the fiber.

Remove this ground paste also to the same bowl in which we have first set of paste.

Now grind the soaked dates and raisins and remove it to the same bowl.

Take jaggery in a pan, add 1 cup of water and let it melt and come to a boil. Strain the jaggery and keep aside.

Let us make the marundhu

Heat a large, heavy bottom pan, add 100 grams of ghee, when it is hot, add the ground paste to it and saute for 5-8 minutes. The ground paste would be in darker green in color. As you saute you feel the aroma of the traditional diwali legiyam/marundu in your kitchen.

After sauteing for 8 minutes, add the strained jaggery, to it and mix well. Now start the process of stirring frequently. Reduce the flame to medium, and let this mixture boil and reduce in quantity, it took around 90 minutes for me to get the final consistency.

I covered the pan with a splatter guard plate from IKEA, saves you from lot of scrubbing later. Keep stirring the mixture frequently. Once it reduces to half its volume, add 100 grams of ghee to it and keep stirring.

First it might look the ghee is floating on top, must as it cooks, the marundhu absorbs and ghee and turns glossy.

The marundhu/legiyam/medicine will come to halwa consistency, add the remaining ghee and stir again. By now the marundhu will comes from the sides of the pan and follows the ladle whenever you stir, you can touch and roll it into a soft ball, then it is done.

Let this cool down overnight completely. First when you taste straight from the stove, you might feel it is very sweet, but onces it cools and the spices mingle and marry together the taste will be right.

The legiyam/marundhu/medicine can be left on the kitchen counter in an air-tight container. No need to refrigerate.

Enjoy a spoonful of this early morning and any time you feel little indigestion or cold fuzzy feeling. The medley of spices will immeidately make you feel warm.

Hahaha, that is a nice interpretation to the theme. It is true that black is hard to achieve unless we burn the food. This legiyam recipe is so much needed during festivals. Will bookmaek this to try later.

Black is my favorite color. and yes, it is difficult to obtain in food. You have got this color beautifully. Thanks for sharing this recipe Priya. I'm always look for such type of traditional recipes. Though I make gur ajwain for the digestion, but this legiyam with so many spices bound to be a better alternative.

Well for a person who's done Phd in our subjects, its hard to find fault at logic right, and that black on food looks brilliant as the food itself. I yet to make this myself though I have been tempted to make it many times. This is a fantastic share Priya, thank you..

Priya would you mind if I make it and make a blog post on my space. For winters this is a must have home remedy with such a great ingredients list. My kids drink kadha, so surely they will love having it in the morning. Fabulous addition must say.